“The Possession” looks like
a good horror film. It talks like a good horror film. It has vision. It has
style. It’s well acted. Unfortunately, it falls victim to the same pitfall that
so many of today’s horror movies suffer from. When all is said and done
everything in it serves the shock factor, rather than the shocks serving the
story and supporting the horror.

It goes wrong from the
opening scene. We hear a strange whispering voice speaking a foreign language
before we see anything. Then we are shown an older woman staring at a dark
wooden box on her mantle. It seems to be whispering to her. She wants to open
it, but she doesn’t. She looks scared of it. She tries to distract herself away
from it, but the whispering persists. Finally, she comes at the box with a
hammer. She stops before she smashes it. An invisible force attacks her and
throws her around the room until she’s incapacitated.

This scene is disturbing,
but it gives the entire movie away in about 90 seconds. The scene is designed
to disturb the audience rather than draw them into the story. There are
elements that could draw us in if this scene were ever referred back to again
later in the movie. But it isn’t. A little later a divorcee father purchases
the box for his youngest daughter in a yard sale. When things start going wrong
for him and his family, why doesn’t he ever seek out the people who sold him
the box? Since we learn in the yard sale scene that the woman didn’t die in the
attack, why don’t we ever visit her again to gain some knowledge about what she
experienced? It’s because the director and writers of this film have seen great
horror movies, but they didn’t study them.

Clyde is a college
basketball coach, whose career has always dominated his life. He’s adjusting to
his divorce, taking his two girls for weekends to his new house in a new and
unfinished subdivision. He’s not adjusting so well to his wife’s new beau, who
is subtly changing the practices of his old household. Stephanie (Kyra
Sedgwick, “The Closer”) is in the final process of removing her ex-husband from
her daily life. She asks him to stop his e-mail from arriving on her computer.
You can tell there’s still love there, but the patience is gone.

Danish director Ole Bornedal
(“Night Watch”) handles these details with tact and a good attention to
character. Jeffery Dean Morgan (“Watchmen”) plays the defeat and acceptance of
Clyde very well. There’s great sadness in the mood of the film. They seem to
have filmed all their outdoor scenes on overcast fall days, leaving the
production design grey and drab. Dread and depression are the orders for the
day. Bornedal handles the interiors with just as much attention to the details
of mood. Instead of placing the characters in older interior designs typical of
the genre, he relies on the sharp angles, empty spaces, and clean darkness of
the new construction of Clyde’s cookie cutter subdivision house. The empty lots
awaiting new houses and half completed construction of other houses add to the
bleak mood.

Clyde is closest to his
youngest daughter, Em (Natasha Calis). His relationship with Hannah (Madison
Davenport, “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl”) is typical of a more-absent-than-not
father. When Em brings home the box, she begins to change; first by obsessing
over the box, then by appearing to become someone else. The initial opening of
the box seems to get shuffled over considering what a big deal the screenplay
makes out of the fact that it doesn’t appear to be any way to open it. It’s
almost as if the director felt he needed to move on to the next segment in the
motifs he’s been establishing to deliver his shocks.

Bornedal structures the
movie as a series of crescendos, moving from one event involving the box to the
next. Each section begins with a directly overhead exterior shot of the
neighborhood in which the scene takes place. It’s quite a startling
establishing image. Each scene ends in loudness from screaming or yelling or some
sort of ambient noise and a musical crescendo in the wonderfully present score
by Anton Sanko. Unfortunately, he drops this motif once he gets to the meat of
what is going on. An overhead shot when Clyde goes to a Hasidic Jewish
community in New York City would’ve been an impressive contrast to the suburban
overheads from the rest of the movie.

The handling of the connection
to the Jewish religion is one of the more disappointing elements of the movie.
It’s easy to compare this film with the 1973 horror classic “The Exorcist”,
since both movies involve a possession of a young girl and a religious
connection to those possessions. This film’s screenplay is inspired by Jewish folklore
about a demon called a Dybbuk, which is exorcized in a Jewish ceremony into a
box. Clyde goes to New York seeking help and a young Rabbi, played by Jewish
rapper Matisyahu, agrees to perform the exorcism. That is about the extent to
which the Jewish religion is used by screenwriters Juliet Snowden and Stiles
White (“Knowing”). There are no questions of faith raised. The family attacked
by this demon is not Jewish. There is no questioning as to whether the possession
is legitimate or not. And where does divorce fit in to all of this? The
religious connection is introduced so late in the story, none of these
questions could be explored had the filmmakers wanted to.

What “The Exorcist” got correct was that the Catholic religion played a
heavy role in its story about a girl who was not Catholic possessed by a demon.
It wasn’t so much about the possession as it was about the people involved and
the dogma of the religion involved. The demon has goals and a purpose that are
not simply to scare the bejeezus out of everybody. By telling a story about
real issues, the horror fantasy becomes more effective. “The Possession” is
content to simply shock the audience without basing its horror on any real
substance. The ideas of a Jewish demon and exorcism are certainly fascinating,
but not when the religion could easily be transplanted by any other religion
that claims to have its own exorcism ritual. I wanted more than just shock and
awe from this move. It’s made with enough skill that a stronger foundation
could’ve allowed it to transcend the genre.

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About Me

Andrew D. WellsAndrew is a professionally trained actor and stage director. He was a reporter for the daily newspaper The Marshall Democrat-News. He has been critiquing film since Mr. Lucas released the first of his "Star Wars" prequels in 1999. His reviews can also be seen atMarshall Democrat-News